


seconds can't bury me

by baterilla



Category: Devilman (Anime & Manga)
Genre: F/F, Gen, crybaby verse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-25
Updated: 2018-01-25
Packaged: 2019-03-09 05:11:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,053
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13474380
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/baterilla/pseuds/baterilla
Summary: Miki remembers steel breathing in the skinny bones of her spine, birthed there by a wrench in her skin, a seizing of her eyes.





	seconds can't bury me

She's read about it, heard about it in the hallways, laughed out on a too-bright screen. You'll dream about things past, things another body did with your face and your voice - or maybe not even that sometimes, maybe just an imprint of your soul scratched into bone, and you'll dream about the smell of a mountain, the feel of teeth growing in a mouth you don't know.

It's all very predictable and known in the same vague way Miki knows she'll die someday, somewhere, the same as everyone else.

When Miki dreams about a few extra limbs and a few detached heads, she rolls over in bed.

Tangential. A ship passing in the night.

 

 

 

The constant is Makimura.

In the dreams, and now too: Makimura sits in front of her, head tilted, hair still wet. Her handwriting is worse than in Miki's dreams; there's a bend to her words, a slant like they're walking steadily off a white cliff.

Miki says her hellos when they pass at the doorway during break, and Makimura smiles back.

It's the same, really, her cheeks a little fuller here than there. Miki doesn't look at it for long.

 

 

 

She's sixteen, she wears her headphones on her runs and keeps her phone in her pocket. She worries about the smell of her mouth, thinks there's a rot in there from keeping it closed too much. She has to push her shoulders back with the whole of her hand, passes it off as a stretch she doesn't need.

Miki remembers steel breathing in the skinny bones of her spine, birthed there by a wrench in her skin, a seizing of her eyes. It grabbed her arms, the lines of her fibers, and hammered them into something bite-shaped.

At home, she stands in front of her mirror. She skims her fingers over her sides, reaches down to pull at her toes. Her skin's white when she presses down, red when she lets go.

In that night's dream, she sees: Her yellow blood; Makimura's shoes, one in mud, the other in a river; the night sky, hidden away by thick knots of gray.

 

 

 

The next day she watches Makimura, if only because it's easy. Miki watches her absently draw crooked shapes in the margins of her notebook, the casual motion of her hand. Miki watches her back during practice, and, like an after-thought, she looks at Makimura's shoes.

They're red. Off-brand, because the laces of her usual ones had snapped last week and her store hadn't had replacements, and just slightly battered at the sole.

Attached firmly to Makimura's feet, and Miki's not sure of when exactly she falls - just that she's running and then there's bits of track in the bloody grooves of her elbow and the afternoon sun snapping at her face.

The others are loitering around the stands, and Makimura's too far ahead to have seen.

"I'm fine," she says, to no one at all.

 

 

 

She's washing out the dirt when Makimura - naturally, obviously - leans into Miki's space and says, "I have antiseptic in my locker."

They're crouched by the hose half-hidden in the clubhouse's shadow. Miki prefers it here, the quiet and the shade playing out on her arms and the dandelions scratching around for light.

She'd had a place like this there: a place of her own, carefully built. She'd had it until she went to a place with noise pushed inside like crowded teeth, too much noise for just one person to hold; and then she became something like two.

Miki asks, "Did you see?"

Makimura blinks. She'd been looking at Miki's elbow and now she looks at her face. Straight in the eyes, just like Miki remembers.

"No," she says, rising. Her shadow skips over the still-running water. "I heard it though," she adds, and she leans to the left, her smile going the same way. A little too pulled to that side, a little too off-kilter, and Miki laughs, her hands in the grass for balance.

 

 

 

Her dreams are fistfuls of one sanitized picture, small objects quickly cut out and dropped against dark backgrounds. She often wakes with a prickling in her legs, in her fingers, like her limbs aren't sure if this is where they're supposed to be, if there's not a better fit somewhere a bit further out. That, and an ache that starts to stretch into her joints, her stomach. The same ache as when she crosses the white line too late.

Makimura's antiseptic sits in Miki's bag during the week it takes her to reach forward and tap Makimura's shoulder, and when Miki finally sets it on her desk, it tips over from the dent on its bottom.

Makimura laughs; the sound covers the echo of the fall, and she takes Miki's hand before she can trip back to her seat.

"Miki, it was for _you_ ," she says.

She's still holding Miki's hand, fingers light against the top of her palm.

 

 

 

She dreams of just one thing that night: A dream of a dream, she thinks, a dream where she and Makimura stretch at the start line of an empty, ten thousand-seat stadium and Makimura's little brother stands off to the side with his arm in the air.

 

 

 

"You're getting faster," Makimura says, breathing out.

Miki's on her toes, hands straight toward the sun. She waits for a crack in her back, and says, "I keep dreaming about running. I guess it's paying off?"

"Maybe," Makimura says. She's smiling again, and Miki's starting to see it's clearer here - sharper, like it's in focus for once. "So? Where are you running to?"

"Um..." She brings her arms down, leans back on the balls of her feet. "I don't know," she says eventually. All she knows is the slope of the beach, the sand against multiple feet, and the vague sense of nothing being ahead: the cruel cut to a race she'd only just started.

Miki turns to Makimura, expectant, and Makimura grins.

"I don't know either," she says. "To world peace, maybe? It's somewhere, right, you just have to get to it. Or maybe to the medal stand?"

She puts her fist in her palm, nodding. "Or," she says, "to everything. _Anything_."

Miki sees the brightness of Makimura's eyes and then she's laughing, doubled over, Makimura complaining in her ear.

**Author's Note:**

> flow??? flow is for people with pride  
> title from eden's take care


End file.
